by Various
For months Maudsley, who had long been Rennison’s artistic benefactor, had been fighting cancer. He lived in one of the last big houses of southern England, on the borders of Devon and Somerset. On one or other of his previous visits, Maudsley had informed him this was the exact place where the colonial Norman influence on Britain had ceased, and that was why there were no other big houses in north Devon. He added that it was also here that the rocky detritus pushed by glaciers of the Ice Age had terminated, leaving a rubble of boulders and unaccountable geological specimens in the interminable mossy ridges that rose greedily about the house.
Maudsley was a stickler for punctuality, and Rennison had been anxious to make good time. The drive was always longer than he supposed. But apart from the usual bottlenecks around Bristol, where the tide of traffic never flows freely, he experienced no problems on the roads, arriving with a good ten minutes to spare before five o’clock, which was his appointed moment.
Approaching the familiar pillars of the gate, his field of vision criss-crossed by the wash of the windscreen wipers, Rennison felt himself assailed by a sense of poignant regret. He thought about the first time he had met Maudsley. It was in the early Nineties, when Africa was unfashionable in both finance and photography. Maudsley was the original man on a motorbike, chucking up his job in the City to ride across the continent, looking for private equity investments at a time when the phrase hedge fund had yet to soil anyone’s lips.
A tall, ginger man approaching forty-five, Rennison got out of the car, feeling a chilly mist about his ears; he unlatched the gate, the iron of the hasp slippery and cold under his fingers.
They had first met on the long straight road that runs from the northern forests of Congo-Brazzaville into Gabon. Maudsley was leaning on his Harley-Davidson, his noble head inclined to one side as he stared avidly into the jungle, smoking a cigarette. There was a squashed snake on the road, which Rennison (rightly, as it turned out) assumed Maudsley must have run over.
Blowing wreaths of smoke into the sky-break above the road, the Maudsley of those days was impossibly brown and fit, his open-neck white shirt showing the line of his tan on his chest. When Rennison clambered from of his Land Rover, the back of which was filled with photographic katundu (as the boot of the Lexus now also was), he had laconically informed him that there was an outbreak of yellow fever in the gold-mining camp he had been visiting, and that Rennison had better go no further.
Maudsley’s words to describe what he had found in the camp consisted mainly of disconnected ejaculations – ‘singular’; ‘most curious’; ‘odd even for Africa’. The bodies that he found there, he’d said, ‘were among the most nauseating I have ever seen, but inexpressibly significant in the way they sat about, lay about, as if death had surprised them’.
‘Like I did this,’ he’d added, hooking the stringy green body of the snake under the toe of one of his shoes and looping it into the trees.
Well, it wasn’t yellow fever, it was Ebola, and Rennison did go further. In an innocence of desire to get his first big spread, he went deep into the rainforest and photographed those victims in their camp near Minkébé. The source of the virus was a chimpanzee killed in the forest, which had been eaten by the miners. Twelve people who were involved in the butchery of the animal had become ill. It was sombre images of these men, covered in mud as they sprawled in wicker chairs in front of their ragged huts, that first made Rennison’s name – along with the vast, deliriously laddered pit itself and the nearby town of stores and whores where girls sold their bodies for a few grains of gold and Lebanese shopkeepers dispensed tots of white spirit and fried chicken for the same.
By the time his pictures of Minkébé were published, the outbreak had spread and become known to the World Health Organization. The fluke of Rennison’s survival of it, itself the later subject of reports in newspaper profiles, added to his lustre as an artist – though he himself readily acknowledged it as one of those temerarious deeds done by those who are funking inside. That was the year he first won adventure photographer of the year and began styling himself ‘Rennison’, without a first name.
He walked across the spongy gravel towards Combe Britton, the roofs of which rose in tiers, as if having been conceived from the back. The effect was emphasised by a lift of dark hills above the chimney-tops. It had perhaps never been a house of good cheer.
He pulled the bell-cord, but it didn’t work, he suddenly remembered, so he resorted to a massy knocker. After some minutes, the door opened. He saw Maudsley’s hooded eyes and white face, slightly unshaven. While still a broad-chested figure, in T-shirt, jeans, cardigan and a sort of paisley kimono, he was a different man from the stylish, bronzed traveller Rennison had first known in Africa, so many years ago, his face always burnished from punctilious washing, razoring and moisturising.
The listless eyes flicked open more widely. ‘You’ve come!’
‘Yes.’
‘I wasn’t sure you would.’
‘I said I would.’
‘You’ve brought your kit?’
‘Yes. I’ll get it later when the rain stops.’
‘It won’t.’
Rennison heard the rain pattering on the gravel behind him – on the gravel and the turfy meadows and the furze-covered hills whence it tumbled in succession down into Simonsbath and the Lyn – as he followed Maudsley into the house, the door shutting loudly after, swinging on its own weight.
The owner of this big house lived alone. There was a gardener and a daily, but no woman’s hand was soothing the passage of his illness – he’d only ever had model girlfriends, mistresses, now all paid off. Maudsley led him into a room where a fire burned. Its flames glinted on the Benin bronzes and other objets d’art which hung on the walls or stood like funerary monuments about the room.
A large box of kitchen matchsticks, half open, sat on the mantelpiece, the red head of each match seeming like that of a soldier lying down to be entombed.
‘Have a seat,’ said Maudsley.
Rennison lowered himself into one of a pair of well-rubbed, red leather armchairs as his ill friend, moving slowly, bent a neglected lock of frost-white hair above a sideboard and poured whisky into tumblers.
He brought one over to Rennison and flung himself into the other chair, the whisky slopping slightly in the glass.
‘I am dying, Richard.’
‘Don’t say that.’
‘Why not? It’s true. Three months at best, the doctors say. That’s why I wanted you to come and take my portrait.’
‘It’s the least I could do. Do you want to get it over straight away? I thought … the morning.’
‘Rennison’s golden hour? If we are lucky. This weather is infernally depressing. I think the mist, like the rain, is here to stay.’
‘That’s just your illness talking.’
‘My illness, dear boy, is always talking. It’s talking in my lungs, where tobacco played havoc for so many years, and now the doc says it’s talking in my bones, too. Mets.’
‘Mets?’
‘Bone metastasis. The cancer cells flowing through the bloodstream like to settle in one’s bones, apparently.’ He took a sip of the whisky. ‘Well at least I will go out at the top of my game. I closed all my positions last week. Pretty much the best returns of any fund this year, on both sides of the Atlantic. And that’s what I wanted to talk to you about, as well as the portrait.’
‘Your funds?’
‘Yes, and being at the top of one’s game. I think you have been slipping lately.’
It was true. Rennison had fallen into an easy routine of shoots for fashion chains and luxury hotels. All his life had been about taking photographs, and there had been many other award-winning highlights besides Minkébé: Mount Roraima and the Kavak caves in Venezuela; the clifftop church of Abuna Ymata, perched on a 2,500-foot-high rock face in Ethiopia; the Noorderlicht ship, frozen into the ice at Spitzbergen … But recently he had been staying more in his studio, managing his stock,
and picking up lucrative commissions as his agent piped them through from ad agencies, on a 25 per cent commission. It made him feel queasy, as his own self-image was involved with a notion that he could scarce understand himself except in situations of authentic action – which shoots in the restaurant of the Dubai Four Seasons or lining up Boden models on the rocks of Polzeath were certainly not.
‘There has been another outbreak at Minkébé. I think you should go back, revisit the scene of your first glory.’
‘No way!’
‘You need to. Think of the headlines. The culmination of a twenty-year journey in photography – a return to the source.’
Rennison’s eye fell on the pattern of the ancient North African prayer rug which lay on the parquet between them. Among the themes suggested were portals, gardens and birds; also lovers, possibly – though not subversively, for the parts conjoined in the way man was meant to join with Allah, who was anyway protecting all under a Tree of Bliss, the boughs of which fell down along the border of the rug.
‘I am not putting myself in the way of that kind of danger again,’ he said. ‘I was very lucky not to have contracted the disease. So were you. Or to have been shot by Monsieur Oueey and his friends.’
Monsieur Oueey was a pit boss who had flown into Minkébé while Rennison was doing the shoot, landing in an army helicopter next to that hellish hole in the ground. His security crew, who carried automatic weapons, had started threatening Rennison. They were about to remove his digital cards when Monsieur Oueey said, ‘Laissez ce blanc, parce qu’il est aussi brave que nous d’être entré dans ce charnier! Qui sait, va t-il gagner sa récompense quand il retournera dans sa terre natale?’
‘I expect Monsieur Oueey is long gone, replaced by another thug. But I am quite serious, Richard. You should know that having no family I have left you most of my legacy – but only on condition that you go back to Minkébé.’
He gave this information very simply, without any typical English show of tactful evasion.
Rennison was almost too shocked to think what the money would mean. ‘Why are you making me do this?’
‘I am not making you. It’s your own choice.’
‘I have my own family now, Charles. My wife wouldn’t let me do this for all the money in China.’
‘You mean tea?’
‘Yes, whatever. Christ, you might be ill, but you haven’t changed.’
‘I should hope not, but actually I have. What I have realised is that I have made a mistake in my life. When I was younger I regarded the world as a lever with which to exert my ego, and that is the basis on which I made my investments. Swimming against the tide, too. When I was going into Africa, Barclays, Standard Chartered and all those other blind bats were already thinking of pulling out. But you know, what I wish I had done was write. When I was up at Balliol, that’s what I wanted to do, then somehow I drifted into the city and became a stockbroker.
‘Then the Big Bang happened and I made a pile of cash and I thought, well Africa is the frontier of emerging markets so I’ll go there and see what can be done by an individual. But I never wrote my book, just my notes from Africa, privately published … well, you have seen a few of those and now there are more. I have left some on your bedside table, as a matter of fact. Anyway, the point is, despite my successful slavings, I think I missed my calling; I don’t want to see you doing the same, with all these ads for InterContinental and whatnot.’
A Malawian soapstone head, its scalp itchy white for lack of oil, regarded Rennison from next to the hearth. He felt a need to defend himself and began doing so warmly.
‘I have to pay the bills. You haven’t got kids, Charles, you don’t know what school fees are like these days.’
‘If you take this offer, you will never have to worry about a bill of any type ever again.’
‘This is about as far from my plans as anything. I’m grateful, of course, but I have been offered a professorship of photography at Goldsmiths and I am minded to say yes.’
‘Being a professor is an awful profession. Paid to talk. I bet Hirst – you know I have one of his – and all the other artists at that place grew as pale and sick as I am, hearing those bald heads talk, talk, talk at them for hours without being able to stop. Shall we eat? I’ve roasted a chicken.’
They went through to the kitchen. In contrast to the rest of the house, it was steely and modern, showing retractable taps out of which ready boiled water flowed, a fierce array of Swiss knife handles, and an Aga garlanded with pots on hooks, either side of a gargantuan hood for removal of fumes.
‘I have had my coffin made,’ said Maudsley, his kimono flapping as he shook a tray of roast potatoes with more vigour than Rennison would have expected from someone in his condition. ‘One of those Ghanaian ones done in the shape of the profession of the deceased, you know?’
‘No?’
‘A fisherman gets a fish. A postman gets a postbox. Someone who sells SIM cards in a roadside shack, a mobile phone.’
‘So what did you choose?’
‘Well, that was the problem. You can hardly have a coffin in the shape of a bearer bond, well, I suppose you could but it would look a bit flat. I thought about what I loved most in my life and what came to mind was that Harley some bugger nicked off me in Maputo. But that didn’t work, too messy with handlebars and pedals and so on, so I got one done which looks like the ’63 Stingray Corvette in the garage here, the one I took you out in when you were last down. Actually, we should do the portrait in it. I’d like that, if it’s OK with you.’
‘In the car?’
‘No, the coffin. It’s in a kind of glass mausoleum I have built in the garden.’
He went over to the window and flicked some switches. A rectangle of glass lit up between clipped yew hedges – and Rennison saw, inside the glass, a bright red shape with an open lid, surrounded by small white stones and a couple of cactus pots.
‘That’s what I am to be put in, when I go. I have made you my executor, by the way. There’s no strings attached to that.’
Returning to the kitchen worktop, Maudsley laughed harshly, then began to cough like a cormorant. Once he had got his breath back, he said, ‘Yes, that administrative pleasure you can have without going to Minkébé. But what do you say, about the other thing?’
‘Let me think about it.’
They ate, and drank red wine, and Maudsley spoke in his thin, cracked voice about his former plans to revivify the African railways, now abandoned because the Chinese had got in on the act. Now and then he paused to spit into a blue handkerchief, saying that he feared each one of these seeds of catarrh would be his last. It was barbarous to expectorate like that during a meal but the man, once the very article of urbanity, was very ill and it was excusable.
After the meal, they retired to the room with the fire, which had become as smokily unwelcome as what followed, which was Maudsley’s return to the topic of Minkébé. Renewing his campaign of persuasion, it was as if he was challenging Rennison, daring him to imperil himself.
The discussion left the photographer in an uncomfortable mood, which pursued him up the wooden staircase to bed. That night, in damp sheets, in a room full of cold air, Rennison thought about what a fine person Maudsley had been in the old days, an authentic Odysseus piloting the excursus of capital into uncharted lands. The story of some of those adventures were recorded in Maudsley’s Notes from Africa; several slim, blue-bound, privately printed volumes of these were stacked on the bedside table, under a lace-fringed lamp.
He wondered why he himself had been chosen to face the test which would win the millions that were the product of those journeys. They had met in many exotic places – in Mbeya once, when green flying ants covered every door, and among the stately royal palms of Mozambique, and amid the quaint glens of Kisoro in western Uganda, even under the jazz-filled roofs of Sowetan shanties – and each time given joint rein to the fancies that such places engender in visitors only.
But never had he
expected to become the heir of the man whom even enemies recognised as the doyen of investment in these regions. And he had a lot of enemies, proudly playing at dinner parties a mobile phone recording in which a philanthropic Irish balladeer pronounced, in a broad Belfast accent, on ‘that cownt Charles Maudsley’. Rennison reached for one of the blue volumes and opening it at random, read: ‘The landscape of African investment is strewn with booby traps. The first thing to remember is that the expert notions are always wrong; you need to treat your investing brain to an enema, flushing out received ideas …’
He read on a little more, then closed the book and turned off the lamp, thinking about what Maudsley had said earlier that night, about wishing he had been a writer. Once before, during one of their meetings in exotic places, Rennison himself had said to Maudsley that he had wished he’d been an investor in Africa rather than a photographer of it. Maudsley had laughed and said don’t be a fool man, art conquers all in the end. Was that it, was trying to prove that what this was all about? But the terms in which the offer was put, as a financial inducement, seemed to suggest the opposite.
For a few seconds, as he lay on the hard pillow, Rennison’s private feelings – private from his wife Tabitha, sleeping miles away in Notting Hill, at least he hoped so – tended to the notion that so much money might be a great way to free him up as an artist; but they quickly bent back to the detestable, dangerous presence of the virus that potentially awaited him in Africa, however that same disease might be read back, over a period of two decades, to have been the thing which formed his sufficiency as an artist in the first place, gauge of a great future. As he tried to sleep, this interplay between art and money began to seem of a piece with a more extensive gallery of catastrophic fates that he feared were in salivatory anticipation of battening on him in the long durée between early middle and old age, louring like gargoyles on a cathedral roof.
His thoughts turned naturally to Tabitha. Tabby never wanted to hear about his trips, having no great curiosity about life beyond west London, and regarding the whole business of photography with a deep distrust. Perhaps she was minded to be complimentary, but it never seemed so. The preparations for an extreme shoot in a remote location she found especially irksome. For Rennison, just the thought of going away to a dangerous place involved readying himself to be traumatised in the name of art. And he had done it, he had gone through shattering moments to generate authentic situations in which the shutter closed, as he still thought of it, on the perfect image.